Basically, religious people use prayer to establish a deeper connection with God. Meditation, on the other hand, does not imply a connection with a higher power. Rather, the goal is for you to establish a connection with yourself. While meditation and prayer have some benefits in common, here are 11 key differences that differentiate them.
In essence, meditations and prayers are the same thing. Both are ways for people to stay still and reflect. Both are used with good intentions, most of the time. And both meditations and prayers make you a better person.
As meditation deepens, one often feels detached from thoughts and sensory experiences, as if they could flow like a river without interference. School-age children can learn the benefits of meditation as part of their education, without referring to any religion or spiritual practice. They imagine meditation as sitting quietly with your legs crossed, and prayer as kneeling with your hands crossed. As soon as children from religious families learn to speak, their parents teach them to say their prayers.
When I saw this quote for the first time, I was amazed, because even though I had a basic understanding of prayer and meditation, I realized that I had thought prayer and meditation were the same thing. Mindfulness meditation is the most popular meditation because it is one of the easiest meditations to learn. Meditation, on the other hand, requires some maturity and is likely to be beyond the patience of the average toddler. You are using your own words or prayers formulated by others to address an external and more powerful spiritual being than you.
And second, after meditating on the Scriptures, pray the verse you just read or have a conversation with God about what you just read. Meditation is not an obligatory practice for anyone, although it brings nothing but benefits to those who make it a habit. It would be foolish to try to generalize, saying that all prayers are a certain way and that all meditations are a certain way. Meditation is generally practiced to better understand the perspective of the external world by coming into contact with conditioned patterns of the mind.
With meditation, unity between you and your inner guide is essential for an attitude of listening, acceptance and self-love. And these meditative acts can be a way of being real with yourself, locating where you are right now, what you are feeling, and identifying your needs.
